Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
METU Architectural History Graduate Symposium 14, Ankara, Türkiye, 18 - 19 Aralık 2025, ss.20, (Özet Bildiri)
Over the past two decades, architecture and urban design in Turkey have become key instruments of a renewed nation-building agenda. As Bülent Batuman (2019) has argued, the production of millet mimarisi (the architecture of the nation) by the current political regime operates beyond aesthetic revivalism; it constitutes a spatial strategy for re-inscribing ideological continuity. Through monumental reconstruction, religious iconography and selective historicism, the state seeks to fuse political legitimacy with architectural permanence—translating the temporal fragility of power into enduring form. This paper explores how such architectures of nationhood might be approached by future architectural historians. How will these constructions be interpreted once their political and economic conditions have faded? Will they be seen as monuments to sovereignty or as artefacts of crisis—testimonies to how architecture was enlisted to stabilise a fragile narrative of collective identity? In this sense, millet mimarisi poses not only a question of style or symbolism but also a question of historiography: how the present scripts its own future archive. Drawing on Reinhart Koselleck’s distinction between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation, the study argues that these built forms project a specific temporality of anticipation—an imagined future where the past is continually re-performed to secure national cohesion. Yet, as climate anxiety, urban precarity and political volatility reshape our collective horizons, such temporal loops risk becoming unreadable or ironic. Methodologically, the paper situates architectural history as a critical practice of futurity: it considers how our current modes of documentation, heritage discourse and academic writing already prefigure how these structures will be remembered, contested or forgotten. By treating millet mimarisi simultaneously as artefact and anticipation, the paper calls for a reflexive historiography attuned to the political construction of futures—and to their inevitable decay in the very monuments that claim to immortalise them.